The lesson we’ve learned from climategate is simple. It’s the same lesson taught by death panels, socialist government takeover, Sharia law, and Obama’s birth certificate. To understand it we must turn to agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. (Hat tip to an excellent recent post on this by John Quiggen.)

Beck, Palin, and the rest of Fox News and talk radio operate on the pretense that they are giving consumers access to a hidden “universe of reality,” to use Limbaugh’s term. It’s a reality being actively obscured the “lamestream media,” academics, scientists, and government officials. Affirming the tenets of that secret reality has become an act of tribal reinforcement, the equivalent of a secret handshake.

The modern right has created a closed epistemic loop containing millions of people. Within that loop, the implausibility or extremity of a claim itself counts as evidence. The more liberal elites reject it, the more it entrenches itself. Standards of evidence have nothing to do with it.

The notion that there is a global conspiracy by professional scientists to falsify results in order to get more research money is, to borrow Quiggen’s words about birtherism, “a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe.” Once you have accepted that shibboleth, anything offered to you as evidence of its truth, no matter how ludicrous, will serve as affirmation. (Even a few context-free lines cherry-picked from thousands of private emails.)

I find a striking similarity of the parts in bold (emphasis mine) with the right wing pro-Hindutva people in India actively rejecting every statement or theory made against their beliefs. The closed epistemic loop here adamantly cling on to such notions like India being a cultural and technological superpower in the ancient past (even many of the highly educated believe that we had nukes and telecommunications technology in the past—all god-made, BTW), or the West stealing great secrets, or the indigenousness of the people of ancient India, or thinking that Adam’s Bridge was actually made by mythical monkeys with floating rocks.

And all this is done with a single goal: to emphasize the greatness of their religion and nationality.

(Source: azspot)